Mr. Speaker, as co-chair of the Canada-China Parliamentary Association and pursuant to Standing Order 34(1) I have the honour to present to the House, in both official languages, the reports of the Canadian delegation of the Canada-China Legislative Association respecting its participation to the co-chair's annual visit to China held in Beijing, Xining, Lhasa and Chengdu, People's Republic of China, April 1 to 11, 2010; and the 13th bilateral meeting held in Beijing, Tianjin, Nanjing, Changshu and Shanghai, People's Republic of China, September 9 to 19, 2010; and the co-chair's annual visit to China held in Beijing, Chongqing, Dali and Kunming, People's Republic of China, March 11 to 19, 2011.

I am also pleased to present the reports of the Canadian delegation of the Canada-China Legislative Association and the Canada-Japan Inter-Parliamentary group respecting its participation to the 17th annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Parliamentary Forum, the APPF, held in Vientane, Laos, January 11 to 15, 2009, the 30th General Assembly of the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, AIPA, held in Pattaya City, Chonburi, Thailand, August 2 to 8, 2009; and the 31st General Assembly of the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, AIPA, held in Hanoi, Vietnam, September 19 to 25, 2010.

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to introduce this bill, which would amend the Criminal Code to make it an offence not to report to the authorities instances of sexual or physical abuse of a child. This is a small bill that has only a few clauses. I hope that all of my colleagues here who want to protect children will support this bill.

This bill would make it an offence to fail or neglect to inform the police or social services of a situation in which someone has reasonable grounds to believe that a child is being sexually or physically abused.

I believe that we all have the responsibility to protect the children in our society, and if we do not do so, if we remain silent or look away, we are just as guilty as the individual committing the crime. I urge all of my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. Speaker, my bill, an act to establish a national Alzheimer's office within the Public Health Agency of Canada, aims to reduce the rising tide of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias in Canada.

The bill calls for the office to develop a national plan to address dementia in conjunction with the provincial and territorial health departments with special goals and an annual report to Parliament; take necessary measures to accelerate the discovery and development of treatments that would prevent, halt or reverse the course of dementia; encourage greater investment in all areas of dementia research; coordinate with international bodies to continue the fight against dementia globally and to build on Canada's existing contributions in this field; assess and disseminate best practices; improving the quality of life of people with dementia and their caregivers; and make recommendations to support and strengthen Canada's dementia care workforce.

Mr. Speaker, I always remind the House that the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans is just that, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, not the minister of mining or agriculture or forestry. The number one job of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is the protection of fish and fish habitat. When we allow mining companies to perfectly destroy a healthy aquatic system that is wrong.

What this bill would do is stop mining companies from using lakes as tailing ponds. If they wish to have their activities they need to do what they did in the past, which is set up independent tailing ponds free and clear of any freshwater aquatic systems that, in any way, destroy the actual habitat of fisheries in this country, because that simply cannot be going on any more.

This bill, hopefully, will be accepted by all members of the House in order to protect fish and fish habitat now and in the future.

Mr. Speaker, this bill is one I have been introducing now since 1997 when one of my constituents actually had to purchase an awful lot of equipment for his dying wife. He was told to institutionalize her but he said, "No. If she is going to die she is going to stay in her own home”. The doctor told him the various things that he would require, which were an additional tub, oxygen measures, different types of food, et cetera. When he tried to claim those on his taxes, many of those items were not tax deductible.

If he had put her as a ward of the state, the cost to the government would have been a tremendous amount of money. He could not understand why he could not claim some of these things to provide care for his wife.

This bill would remedy that. If people have a dying relative in their home, they should be able to claim what is required as a tax deduction to prevent the person from becoming institutionalized.

This would allow people who are in the dying phases of their lives to at least die in their own homes with a sense of dignity. It would also allow caregivers to deduct the equipment and purchases that they require in order to make a dying person's life more comfortable at the end.

Mr. Speaker, I hope the justice minister is aware of this particular one because one of the things that offends me greatly is the lack of respect for our police officers and men and women in uniform.

What this particular bill would do is that when someone commits a crime of murder against one of our peace officers, he or she should be held to the maximum extent that the law requires, which is 25 years without a chance of parole. We may even want to think about making it longer because when one takes the life of a peace officer whose duty is to protect us and our families, that is something that I, personally, and I know that many members of Parliament from all sides, simply cannot accept.

I am hoping that the justice minister will actually take this bill and maybe make it a government bill in order to move it forward to ensure that our peace officers get the respect that they deserve.

Mr. Speaker, when people make a donation of some kind to a charity, they get a taxable receipt. However, if they provide services to that charity it is not necessarily tax deductible.

What I am trying to do in this bill is to say that if people provide various services in kind for a charitable organization then the services that they render should be tax deductible. For example, people may lend their car to a Lion's Club so that its members can drive a person to a medical appointment. That vehicle saves them a lot of time, money and effort and the owners should be able to deduct some of those services that they have rendered in kind for tax deductible purposes. That would encourage more people in the future to give not only their cash but also their time.

Mr. Speaker, all of us know what it is like to have a home, to have shelter where we feel safe and secure and where our families and our neighbours are safe and secure. Can anyone imagine not having a home?

We were just in Vancouver where we were told that on any given day there are 50,000 people on the streets. In Canada, right across the country, there could be well over 100,000 people without shelter. Shelter in this country should be a constitutional right. Every Canadian citizen should have access to shelter, be it an apartment, a condo, a house or whatever, but they should have a right to safe, affordable and secure housing.

We would like to amend the Constitution by ensuring that this definitely becomes a constitutional right of all Canadian citizens.

Mr. Speaker, this comes right out of the Royal Canadian Legion playbook, to be completely frank, and all the veterans organizations.

When a veteran or RCMP member dies, his or her spouse gets 50% of his or her pension. I wonder if everybody in this room or average Canadians could live on 50% of their salary tomorrow.

My bill asks for an increase to survivor benefits according to the Royal Canadian Legion mandate and other veterans organizations. We would hope to get very speedy passage on this one because the survivors who looked after our heroes are the ones who now need looking after. They require a little bit more income near the retirement stage of their lives or that of their children.

Mr. Speaker, as a married man, you know this all too well. What happens, and pray it never happens, if a wife passes away when the husband is 54 years old? If the husband remarries at age 58, for example, lives for 20 years and then dies, the second spouse gets the pension.

However, if that husband had the audacity to remarry at age 60, live for 20 years and then pass away, his second spouse gets zero. That is called the gold digger clause. Some people call it the Anna Nicole clause. It has been around since the Boar War. The British government was worried about young women marrying older veterans for their pensions.

I have a lot of Camp Hill veterans that say that if young girls want to marry them, they have time, so those young girls should come on over and marry them.

The reality is that it should not be up to the government to tell people whom they remarry and when. The last surviving spouse should be entitled to the pension. We should not put it at age 60. It is discriminatory. It needs to change. This is something that affects all federal public servants, including ourselves, throughout the entire country.

We would hope that all members of Parliament, even if it is for self-respect, will get this done. When we lose a loved one, it is a terrible day, but if we have the good fortune to love again and remarry and live out our final years before we pass away, our second spouse should not be abandoned.

We are hoping the bill will pass very quickly to get rid of the marriage after 60 act, which is what the bill hopes to do.

Mr. Speaker, anybody who has had the opportunity to travel overseas and see the great sites of our heroes in France, Belgium, Hong Kong, and Italy knows what a moving experience that really is. Unfortunately, an awful lot of Canadians do not get that opportunity.

This bill would encourage the federal government to work with the provinces, territories, schools, municipalities, aboriginal groups, et cetera, so that in the lifetime of a student, he or she would get at least one opportunity to travel overseas to walk the grounds of those cemeteries where our war dead are buried.

We have 118,000 Canadians who have passed on fighting for our country, buried in over 70 countries around the world. What a great thing it would be for Canadians to have at least an opportunity during their school life to visit these gravesites.

I believe this could be encouraged by working co-operatively to find the resources. By working with other sectors, as well as the private sector, we could allow for every student, at least once in their student life, an opportunity to visit our heroes who had fallen in other countries.

Mr. Speaker, I could not help but notice that the Conservatives have adopted some aspects of this bill in their budget. However, in typical fashion, they never go far enough.

This bill would expand the expenses provided for caregivers to allow them to assist and give of their time when they care for someone who is under palliative care or rehabilitation services. It would also allow those individuals time off work to provide that care.

Imagine a child diagnosed with cancer and only six months to live. What are those parents prepared to do? They would take time off work and care for their child during the last six months. If they could not afford to take time off work, they may lose their job, so not only would they suffer the loss of a child but they would suffer financially as well.

We simply do not think people should go through that alone. This bill would provide assistance with some of the costs in caring for an individual in their final stages of life or in severe rehabilitation services.

We hope that this bill and all the others, which are some of the finest pieces of legislation ever to grace the floor of the House of Commons, get passed all bundled together very quickly.

Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions signed by constituents of my riding.

The first petition states that over 200,000 civilians were killed in the first atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 with tens of thousands of additional human beings severely injured. However, there are over 27,000 nuclear weapons that still exist today. Of the 26,000 nuclear weapons held by the United States and Russia, 3,000 are on a 15-minute warning launch status and threaten to destroy us.

The petitioners call upon Parliament to establish a department of peace to reinvigorate Canada's role as a global peacebuilder and seek the abolition of nuclear weapons as a top priority.